Our Mission
Optimizing the positive impact of housing on health through interdisciplinary synergies.
A platform where people from different fields, organizations, and communities come together to share knowledge, resources, and ideas for adequate and healthier housing. Through interdisciplinary collaboration we unlock the full potential of projects and solutions contributing to building healthy communities around the world.
Our Vision
Housing that promotes healthy families as laid out by the Declaration of Human Rights* is guaranteed.
A world where knowledge and solutions are shared and accessible to build housing that promotes health and quality of life for people regardless of where they are, and enables families and communities to focus on reaching their maximum potential.
*Article 25.1 of the UDHR
Our Values
We are a group of professionals from diverse fields related to the built environment and public health.
Spearheaded by ARCHIVE Global, we are comprised of representatives from the nonprofits and NGOs, academic institutions, public health experts, design professionals, multilateral organizations and more. This early version of The Health Through Housing Coalition has been made possible with the support of the BOVA Network funded through the UK Government’s Grand Challenges Research Fund. We aim to bring together people across sectors to foster collaboration at the intersection of health and the built environment and use housing to improve health outcomes globally. Our advisors have included: The World Health Organization (WHO), UN Habitat, Ifakara Health Institute, Al Borde, University College London-Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE) , the BOVA Network, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and others.
Management Board
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Al Borde Architecture
Al Borde is an architecture studio, and more than anything is a lifestyle. It began in May 2007; its headquarters are at 2800 m.a.s.l. in Quito-Ecuador. The leaders behind this idea are Pascual Gangotena, David Barragán, Marialuisa Borja, and Esteban Benavides who got their architecture degrees at the School of Architecture, Design, and Arts of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador. They face the field of Architecture through its multiple complexities and operate within the gaps in the system. They disrupt it unapologetically, are resilient by nature, and are reluctant to dogmatic principles. Their way of thinking includes a daily habit of working with one’s hands, and are particularly attached to local realities. Their projects seek to enhance local resources that they find in the landscape and have a high social innovation component.
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Christophe Lalande
UN Habitat
Christophe Lalande is the lead housing specialist at UN-Habitat. He coordinates the implementation of global programmes on housing policy development and housing rights, including the production of housing policy guidelines, methodologies, and tools to guide national and local governments’ efforts in the provision of affordable housing solutions. He leads global advocacy efforts to promote the realisation of the right to adequate housing, such as the UN-Habitat’s Housing For All Campaign to promote people’s health, dignity, safety, inclusion and well-being, through access to affordable and adequate housing. Christophe has over fifteen years of professional experience in housing policy and urban development. He graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques – Lille and holds an MSc in Public Policy and Political Sociology from Sciences Po Ecole Doctorale.
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Dr. Ramona Ludolph
World Health Organization (WHO)
Dr Ramona Ludolph is a Technical Officer for Housing and Air Quality at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. She is managing WHO’s global activities on healthy housing. A key element of the housing portfolio is the implementation of the WHO Housing and Health Guidelines at national and subnational levels through multidisciplinary collaboration. Implementation activities include the development of tools to translate the evidence-based guidelines into policy and practice, advocacy and capacity building on housing as a social and environmental determinant of health as well as evidence generation and syntheses to identify interventions that promote healthy and equitable housing. She is also working on broader urban health projects such as the development of a global urban health research agenda and evidence-based guidance on the creation of age-friendly cities and communities. Ramona holds a PhD from the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and a Master of Public Health from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany.
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Dr. Emily Nix
University of Liverpool
Dr Emily Nix is a researcher and practitioner focused on the interactions between housing, health and sustainability in low and middle-income countries. She holds a PhD from University College London and combines expertise and methods from the built environment and health with participatory and qualitative methods from development studies. She has extensive fieldwork experience in low-income urban settings in the Global South, particularly in Delhi’s informal settlements co-creating and evaluating inclusive housing solutions for health and sustainability with the community and local stakeholders. She has contributed to international consortiums and organisations, such as the World Health Organization, on issues of housing and health.
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Sarah Ruel-Bergeron
RA, ARCHIVE Global
Sarah Ruel Bergeron, RA is the Executive Director at ARCHIVE Global, a non-profit implementing projects that combat disease through interventions to the built environment in vulnerable communities worldwide. She is a licensed architect and currently pursuing a Certificate in Global Health Practice from Johns Hopkins University. At ARCHIVE she divides her time between organizational oversight and project management to design, implement and evaluate projects that operate at the intersection of health and the built environment. One of the organization’s key projects focuses on replacing dirt floors with concrete in Bangladesh to prevent diarrheal disease and respiratory and skin infections. Over multiple phases the project has replaced the floors of nearly 300 homes at a cost of about $1 / square foot. ARCHIVE is currently focused on projects to strengthen resource-limited communities whose focus is necessarily COVID-19 prevention. Sarah has extensive experience in affordable housing, healthcare architecture, and construction, with a focus on sustainable design, resiliency, and hazard mitigation in vulnerable environments.
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Dr. Anne Wilson
BOVA Network
Dr Anne Wilson is an infectious disease epidemiologist who works on malaria and other vector borne diseases. Anne conducts multidisciplinary research with entomologists, spatial and mathematical modellers, social scientists and health economists. She has a special interest in increasing the role of the non-health sector, for example, agriculture, housing and communities in combatting vector-borne diseases. Anne is co-Director of a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award on the distribution, epidemiological importance and control of Anopheles stephensi, an invasive urban malaria mosquito recently found in the Horn of Africa. She is also conducting research on how novel housing designs can prevent entry of malaria mosquitoes and risk of Aedes-transmitted diseases in Yaounde in Cameroon. Anne is also co-director of the BOVA Network – an inter-disciplinary research network that aims to stimulate research on the role of the built environment in control of vector-borne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.
Advisory Board
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Sarah Ruel-Bergeron, RA
Sarah Ruel Bergeron, RA is the Executive Director at ARCHIVE Global, a non-profit implementing projects that combat disease through interventions to the built environment in vulnerable communities worldwide. She is a licensed architect and currently pursuing a Certificate in Global Health Practice from Johns Hopkins University. At ARCHIVE she divides her time between organizational oversight and project management to design, implement and evaluate projects that operate at the intersection of health and the built environment. One of the organization’s key projects focuses on replacing dirt floors with concrete in Bangladesh to prevent diarrheal disease and respiratory and skin infections. Over multiple phases the project has replaced the floors of nearly 300 homes at a cost of about $1 / square foot. ARCHIVE is currently focused on projects to strengthen resource-limited communities whose focus is necessarily COVID-19 prevention. Sarah has extensive experience in affordable housing, healthcare architecture, and construction, with a focus on sustainable design, resiliency, and hazard mitigation in vulnerable environments.
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Dr. Emily Nix
Dr Emily Nix is a researcher and practitioner focused on the interactions between housing, health and sustainability in low and middle-income countries. She holds a PhD from University College London and combines expertise and methods from the built environment and health with participatory and qualitative methods from development studies. She has extensive fieldwork experience in low-income urban settings in the Global South, particularly in Delhi’s informal settlements co-creating and evaluating inclusive housing solutions for health and sustainability with the community and local stakeholders. She has contributed to international consortiums and organisations, such as the World Health Organization, on issues of housing and health.
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Anne Wilson
Dr Anne Wilson is an infectious disease epidemiologist who works on malaria and other vector borne diseases. Anne conducts multidisciplinary research with entomologists, spatial and mathematical modellers, social scientists and health economists. She has a special interest in increasing the role of the non-health sector, for example, agriculture, housing and communities in combatting vector-borne diseases. Anne is co-Director of a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award on the distribution, epidemiological importance and control of Anopheles stephensi, an invasive urban malaria mosquito recently found in the Horn of Africa. She is also conducting research on how novel housing designs can prevent entry of malaria mosquitoes and risk of Aedes-transmitted diseases in Yaounde in Cameroon. Anne is also co-director of the BOVA Network – an inter-disciplinary research network that aims to stimulate research on the role of the built environment in control of vector-borne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Ramona Ludolph
Public Health Study and Design of Interventions (Multilateral Org)
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Christophe Lalande
Christophe Lalande is the lead housing specialist at UN-Habitat. He coordinates the implementation of global programmes on housing policy development and housing rights, including the production of housing policy guidelines, methodologies, and tools to guide national and local governments’ efforts in the provision of affordable housing solutions. He leads global advocacy efforts to promote the realisation of the right to adequate housing, such as the UN-Habitat’s Housing For All Campaign to promote people’s health, dignity, safety, inclusion and well-being, through access to affordable and adequate housing. Christophe has over fifteen years of professional experience in housing policy and urban development. He graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques – Lille and holds an MSc in Public Policy and Political Sociology from Sciences Po Ecole Doctorale.
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David Barragan
Architect (Design firm)
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